Big business is starting to put humanitarian concerns at the core of its
global strategy.

It was not an invitation to decline. “Come to our conference and Jamie Oliver and Sir Richard Branson will together cook dinner.” Indeed, the prospect of discovering how the two icons would get on in the kitchen was even more alluring than the promise of an exceptional meal.

I accepted, of course. Yet when I turned up at the erstwhile naked chef’s Fifteen restaurant in Shoreditch, east London, earlier this week, I found that celebrity cooking was off the menu; the titans merely arranged one course on the plate. But the verbal fare was unusual enough.

For this was a meeting of top businessmen insisting that “doing good” was more profitable than concentrating purely on the bottom line. They spoke not just of harnessing market forces for society and the environment, but of how “there is a spiritual aspect to business”.

Off the wall? You might think so, were it not for the unsentimental success of the tycoons doing the talking. Branson himself – who has written the manual for the new movement, Screw Business as Usual – now spends four fifths of his time on environmental and other public issues, while still pulling off coups such as buying Northern Rock. Oliver – who trains troubled teenagers for careers in catering – employs 7,000 people and records annual profits well into eight figures.

Then there was Jochen Zeitz, who at 30 became the youngest ever German CEO, and turned Puma from a cheap, uncheerful sporting goods brand into one of the world’s top three, multiplying the company’s share price 40-fold in 13 years. He has drawn up the world’s first “environmental profit and loss account” to identify precisely how his company is damaging the planet, so as to improve its performance. “We need,” he says, “to ingrain systemic change into what we are doing.”

Part of Zeitz’s motivation is religious, but it was Ben Cohen, one of the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream, who spoke of spirituality. “Just as for individuals,” he said, “as you give you receive, as you help others you are helped in return, as your business helps the community, so the community supports your business.”

He insists that focusing on “shared values” – rather, presumably, than share value – is “very profitable”. Whereas conventional companies “pay a whole bunch of money to advertising agencies to come up with a made-up story to try to make the public feel good about their brands, a value-led business puts its resources into adding to the quality of life in the community. That builds customer loyalty.”

Ben and Jerry’s was taken over by Unilever 12 years ago on what Cohen once described as “just about the worst day of my life”, but the giant multinational now seems infected by his ethos. It has adopted a radical Sustainable Living Plan and its CEO Paul Polman recently commented: “We firmly believe that if we focus our company on improving the lives of the world’s citizens and come up with genuine sustainable solutions, we are more in sync with consumers and society, and ultimately this will result in good shareholder returns.”

He is now to present the message at next month’s environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro. Dubbed Rio +20 because it marks the 20th anniversary of the city’s 1992 Earth summit, it is to focus on building green economies. Bruised by the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, world leaders are approaching it with no great enthusiasm, and business – far ahead of governments in pioneering change – is likely to make the running.

Another theme at the summit will be the international governance of environmental issues, including the role of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). That interests me since, in a freelance capacity, I have long done work for it, mainly in editing its magazine, Our Planet – a discussion forum running articles from the likes of heads of state and government, ministers, scientists, and businessmen. Though the agency has naturally made news at times through issuing reports and holding conferences, this will be the first time, in my association with it, that it has itself been a story.

The meeting will consider replacing UNEP with a stronger World Environment Organisation, something I support. Yet the prospects of one of the smaller UN bodies are likely to receive little public attention next to the big question of whether the world can return to growth through pursuing low-carbon prosperity. And any such enterprise will rely on the kind of businessmen who met in Oliver’s noshery this week.

A promise to the starving poor that must bear fruit

Leaders meeting at the G8 summit at Camp David this weekend are breaking from grappling with the woes of the eurozone to consider a looming world food crisis.

It’s an odd situation, since the world is on course to produce yet another record harvest this year, but food prices appear to have stabilised at a high level, well above the one that precipitated a crisis four years ago.

The problem is not too little supply, but too much demand – much of it from biofuels and increased consumption of grain-fed meat – aggravated by speculation.

So hunger is spreading again. The number of Tanzanian households that cannot afford three meals a day, for example, has increased by 20 per cent, while poor crops and lack of money mean 15 million people in the Sahel face famine. And year in, year out, a billion or so people go hungry.

Much the best way to tackle this is for the world’s poorest farmers, often among the hungry themselves, to produce more. And the 2009 G8 meeting – in L’Aquila, Italy, – pledged an extra $22 billion in aid to agriculture, to help them do so. But three years later, only $6.5 billion has been disbursed.

As David Cameron said last year: “When you make a promise to the poorest children in the world, you should keep it.”

Bright spark brings shedloads of light to desperate Filipinos

What’s the best thing to do with those environmentalists’ hate objects, plastic bottles? Here’s a contender. Use them to light up the lives of some of the poorest people on earth.

This is how it works. The bottles are filled with water, plus a little bleach to stop bacteria proliferating; then they are attached to corrugated iron, and pushed halfway through the roof of dark, windowless shanties whose inhabitants either have no electricity or cannot afford to use it.

The daylight streams in through the bottle and is refracted by the water, bringing about 55 watts of illumination and transforming families’ lives. Each one costs about a dollar to make, takes an hour to install and should last a good five years.

It’s the idea of Illac Diaz, a model turned entrepreneur, who developed it while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Fulbright Scholarship, and brought it back to his native Philippines. So far, 25,000 “solar bottle bulbs” have been installed and Diaz’s foundation, MyShelter, plans to reach one million by the end of the year and four million within 18 months.

The scheme is a finalist in the Ashden Awards for green energy, to be announced this month. But perhaps it was all preordained. For Diaz’s Christian name means “god of light”.